Currently there are 11,900 registered students, I am not sure why
this number is more than the target figure mentioned at the previous
program. One of the numbers does not seem to be consistent.
GGC New hires
SST has had 20 new faculty new hires for AY 2015-2016. 2 Math and 1 Physics faculty from Vietnam will be visiting GGC for shadowing in lectures, it is a part of an agreement between GGC and a Vietnam's national university.
New Constructions
The C-bldg will have an addition to it to double its size, and the following year AY 2016-2017 there will be further addition to bldg C. It will have school of Business and Education in bldg-C, AEC will move into bldg-C. In AY 2015-16, the focus is on the classroom and teaching spaces, and in the following year, the concentration will be on increasing faculty spaces. Eventually faculty from RL will me moved out to free-up space for students in RL bldg.
New major
GGC has started new major in environmental science from AY 2015-16. The major in Interdisciplinary Science is being OKed by GGC. Dean suspects, that there might not be a new major added at GGC after the Interdisciplinary Science. However, there might be additions to "tracks" to existing majors.
STEM Initiation-III
Dean was not aware if USG would offer the III phase of the STEM initiative, as it is a part of GGC's teaching culture. Dean is planning to have a sustainable STEM initiative inbuilt at SST.
Foundational courses (algebra/quantitative) reasoning to Access courses. With the introduction of Co-requisite model (get information from Math faculty/Keri about the access courses)
New Hire for Administrative staff:
There are 80 applicants for this open position and the search committee would finalize its selection after starting sorting through the applications in Sept 01 2015. To aid the current admin staff, it is advised to complete travel-related documents at least 2 weeks ahead of the scheduled travel.
Budget Program Manager Position Open
Manage SST budget and coordinate with GGC campus for summer camps etc. The advert for this would be soon posted.
Current Student Enrollment
The target was 11,700 in AY 2015 beginning. It was about 11,000 students during the Spring 2015 term. Dean was not sure if GGC would meet its target, as he felt that many other colleges have been advertising in Gwinnett County and GGC has not been active on this front.
Sabbatical Leave policy
Techinically its called educational leave. Is available in GGC faculty policy hand book.
E-core courses
The USG is trying to push GGC to have e-core that circumvents students to take few courses in the college and instead they take it at home, online......It is a strange proposition. For now, GGC is not offering the e-core courses until USG mandates it to GGC. Currently, e-core courses are offered by other USG institutions, it can be taken under transient student status.
PNC committee
Alvina Atkison
Wei Liu
Peter Meso
Karen Perell-Gerson
Dave Purcell (chair)
Stella Smith
Candace Timple
-Turn in dossier the dossier in USB drive and drop off at Dean's office by 4 pm in Sept 4th 2015
-Support letters with signed waiver form to Dave Pursell directly from writeres via email by 4 pm on the deadline
-P&C recommendation given to dean by Oct 9th 2015
-P&C committee values dossier organization and brevity
-Name dossier folders and files appropriately (name and length)
-If you plan to submit the dossier:
email Dave Pursell as soon as possible
Dave Pursell eill email the status of support letters recieved by him
Faculty Senate Update
-upto 10% representation of various STEM disciplines.
-Senate website is up
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
Practical Help
-During first half of carrying a baby, it is best to leave the baby alone by doing nothing.
-Take an extra 300 calories per day\Eat fruits and vegetables, good supply of folic acid, iron, iodine, vitamin B12 and Omega-3.
-Doing 30 minutes of aerobic exercise each day. Exercise is a stress-reducer, good for keeping glucocorticoids away from developing neurons
-Reducing stress in life
-For the baby:
Create a playroom with following: place for drawing, painting, musical instruments, blocks, picture books, craft area,
-For Parents:
Make a list of all behaviors that parents broadcast to the world. Have both the parents make their individual list. Ask other spouse to rate these behaviors as good or bad. Decide on which behaviors that parents would prefer their children to emulate, circle them. Decide the behaviors that parents would not like to be emulated, and cross through them. Do something about the list.
-Mention "Wow! you really worked hard" rather than praising child's innate characteristics.
-Read together, read aloud to the child
-Develop empathy
-Verbalizing emotions
-10 years of music lessons
-Understanding other's point of view
-CAP your rules:
C:Clarity
A: Accepting
P: Praise
-FIRST feedback
F:firm
I:immediate
R:reliable
S:safe
T:tolerant
All is well!
-Take an extra 300 calories per day\Eat fruits and vegetables, good supply of folic acid, iron, iodine, vitamin B12 and Omega-3.
-Doing 30 minutes of aerobic exercise each day. Exercise is a stress-reducer, good for keeping glucocorticoids away from developing neurons
-Reducing stress in life
-For the baby:
Create a playroom with following: place for drawing, painting, musical instruments, blocks, picture books, craft area,
-For Parents:
Make a list of all behaviors that parents broadcast to the world. Have both the parents make their individual list. Ask other spouse to rate these behaviors as good or bad. Decide on which behaviors that parents would prefer their children to emulate, circle them. Decide the behaviors that parents would not like to be emulated, and cross through them. Do something about the list.
-Mention "Wow! you really worked hard" rather than praising child's innate characteristics.
-Read together, read aloud to the child
-Develop empathy
-Verbalizing emotions
-10 years of music lessons
-Understanding other's point of view
-CAP your rules:
C:Clarity
A: Accepting
P: Praise
-FIRST feedback
F:firm
I:immediate
R:reliable
S:safe
T:tolerant
All is well!
Let your Yes be YES and your No be NO
If you lose emotions, you lose decision-making. Emotional regulation is an important component of raising a child. For the growth of moral awareness/conscience:
1) provide clear, consistent rules and rewards
2)swift consequences/feedback
3)explaining the rules.
Every time a child follows the rules, it is desired to offer praise to the child. When warm accepting parents set clear and reasonable standards for their kids then offer them praise for behaving well, children present strong evidence of an internalized moral construct, usually by age 4 or 5. They are not everything you need in your moral toolkit, but from a statistical point of view, you might not find a good kid without these qualities.
Negative reinforcement trends to strengthen behaviors where as punishments trends to weaken them. Negative reinforcement refers to removing of avoiding aversive stimulus. Research indicates that children learn behaviors best when they are allowed to make their own mistakes and feel the consequences first-hand.
Here are the guidelines for providing healthy feedback to children:
- The feedback must be firm and not be hurting the child, its a feedback only.
-it must be consistent, every time an undesired behavior is displayed.
-it must be immediate after an undesired behavior is displayed
People respond to feedback which contain cognitive rationale. The rationale consists of explaining why the rule and its consequences exist. Parents providing clear, consistent, and quick feedback that contains reasons for its necessity help their children in assimilating the importance of the feedback.
Research about spanking
A 5-year review of the research literature by a committee of child development specialists sponsored by the American Psychological Association found evidence that spanking caused more behavioral problems than other types of feedback. It produced more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs. Another 2010 study by Tulane University School of Public Health researcher Catherine Taylor found corroborating results. It found that 3 years old who were spanked more than twice in the month prior to the study were 50% more likely to be aggressive by age 5, even when controlling for differing level of aggression among kids and for maternal depression, alcohol or drug use, or spousal abuse. Author John Medina indicates that spanking is a lazy form of parenting and there are better ways of it.
Summary
-Every child has an innate sense of right and wrong
-Moral behavior develops over time and requires parental guidance
-Parents suggested feedback: realistic, clear expectatio0ns, consistent, immediate consequences for undesirable behavior, praise for good behavior.
-Children tend to assimilate moral behavior when parents explain why a particular behavior is desirable/undesirable and explain the consequences of either actions.
1) provide clear, consistent rules and rewards
2)swift consequences/feedback
3)explaining the rules.
Every time a child follows the rules, it is desired to offer praise to the child. When warm accepting parents set clear and reasonable standards for their kids then offer them praise for behaving well, children present strong evidence of an internalized moral construct, usually by age 4 or 5. They are not everything you need in your moral toolkit, but from a statistical point of view, you might not find a good kid without these qualities.
Negative reinforcement trends to strengthen behaviors where as punishments trends to weaken them. Negative reinforcement refers to removing of avoiding aversive stimulus. Research indicates that children learn behaviors best when they are allowed to make their own mistakes and feel the consequences first-hand.
Here are the guidelines for providing healthy feedback to children:
- The feedback must be firm and not be hurting the child, its a feedback only.
-it must be consistent, every time an undesired behavior is displayed.
-it must be immediate after an undesired behavior is displayed
People respond to feedback which contain cognitive rationale. The rationale consists of explaining why the rule and its consequences exist. Parents providing clear, consistent, and quick feedback that contains reasons for its necessity help their children in assimilating the importance of the feedback.
Research about spanking
A 5-year review of the research literature by a committee of child development specialists sponsored by the American Psychological Association found evidence that spanking caused more behavioral problems than other types of feedback. It produced more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs. Another 2010 study by Tulane University School of Public Health researcher Catherine Taylor found corroborating results. It found that 3 years old who were spanked more than twice in the month prior to the study were 50% more likely to be aggressive by age 5, even when controlling for differing level of aggression among kids and for maternal depression, alcohol or drug use, or spousal abuse. Author John Medina indicates that spanking is a lazy form of parenting and there are better ways of it.
Summary
-Every child has an innate sense of right and wrong
-Moral behavior develops over time and requires parental guidance
-Parents suggested feedback: realistic, clear expectatio0ns, consistent, immediate consequences for undesirable behavior, praise for good behavior.
-Children tend to assimilate moral behavior when parents explain why a particular behavior is desirable/undesirable and explain the consequences of either actions.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Parents role
A parents attentive and patient peekaboo type of reciprocating interaction with their child helps in development of neural architecture in a positive way. A baby who is devoid of synchronous interaction can be at a disadvantage. In 1960's researchers coined the term 'attachment' to denote the reciprocating relationship between parents and a child.
Attachment takes years to develop between parents and a child. It is not a short duration of time immediately after a child's arrival to the world. Definitely the sentence "Please do not remove babies from mothers until after bonding has taken place" does not stand on its feet. The relationships that form from the reciprocating interactions develop slowly and may take up to 2 or more years to develop. Parents who consistently apply attention to their children during the initial 2 years statistically raise happy kids.
Who can probably be a terrific kid:
-having emotional regulation, calming themselves effectively and quickly
-high academic achievement
-greater empathetic nature
-loyalty to parents with higher compliance rates and obedience arising from feeling connected to parents (not from fear)
-fewer incidences of pediatric depression and anxiety related issues.
-less infectious issues
-less prone to violence
-deep and lots of friends
In giving the best parenting to child the following can be some of the observed characteristics, according to the author of this book.
-a demanding but warm parenting style
-comfort with your own emotions
-tracking a child's emotions
-verbalizing emotions
-running toward emotions
-a lot of empathy
According to Diana Baumrind, UC-BErkeley, the 4 styles of child upbringing are based on two dimensions. Her results have been confirmed in a massive 1994 study involving thousands of students as they entered adolescence in California and Washington states.
1) Responsiveness: its the degree to which parents respond to their children with support, warmth, affection, and acceptance. Warm parents usually communicate tiehr affection for their kids. Hostile parents mostly communicate their rejection of their kids.
2) Demandingness: the degree to which parents attempts to exert behavioral control. Restrictive parents tend to make and enforce rules mercilessly. permissive parents do not make any rules at all.
Theutho 4 parenting styles are:
-Authoritative: high demanding and high responsive, the best combination
-Authoritarian: high demanding and low responsive, too hard
-Indulgent: low demanding and high responsive, too soft
-Neglectful:low remanding and low responsiveness
Labeling and recognizing emotions is neurologically calming
Research has shown that parents who help their children in recognizing the emotions the child feels have a better chance in raising happy children. Kids who experience a parenthood that teaches them to recognize the child's feelings on regular basis become better at self-soothing and are more able to focus on tasks and have successful peer relationships. This is true because children experience the physiological results of emotional responses before they know and realize the verbal ways to phrase them to themselves. Without language-labels to describe the feelings children have, they can get confused as to what they experience.
10 years of music training
Researchers in Chicago have shown that children with experience in music learning, ones who have studied any musical instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7 were able to respond to subtle variations in emotional cues. Where as children without musical training did not show a distinctions in the emotions. This study suggests that for having happy kids later in life, get them started out on a musical journey =, early in life. Making sure that they stick with it for at least for 10 years.
Importance of acknowledging all emotions
People who deny their feelings often make bad choices. It is undertsood that no technique can make a feeling go away. It is suggested that parents verbalize the feelings of a child, this helps the children realize that the parents understand the child. Zecondly, validate the child's feelings if they are correct. Thirdly, indicate to the child that his/her feelings are understood by the parent. Essentially, it means that parents need to be emphatetic.
Key Points
-Infant needs parents to watch, listen, and repond to them
-How parents respond to their toddler's intense emotions is a big factor in determining how happy they might be as adults
-Children are happiest if their parents are demanding and warm
-Emotions need to be acknowledged and named but not judged.
Attachment takes years to develop between parents and a child. It is not a short duration of time immediately after a child's arrival to the world. Definitely the sentence "Please do not remove babies from mothers until after bonding has taken place" does not stand on its feet. The relationships that form from the reciprocating interactions develop slowly and may take up to 2 or more years to develop. Parents who consistently apply attention to their children during the initial 2 years statistically raise happy kids.
Who can probably be a terrific kid:
-having emotional regulation, calming themselves effectively and quickly
-high academic achievement
-greater empathetic nature
-loyalty to parents with higher compliance rates and obedience arising from feeling connected to parents (not from fear)
-fewer incidences of pediatric depression and anxiety related issues.
-less infectious issues
-less prone to violence
-deep and lots of friends
In giving the best parenting to child the following can be some of the observed characteristics, according to the author of this book.
-a demanding but warm parenting style
-comfort with your own emotions
-tracking a child's emotions
-verbalizing emotions
-running toward emotions
-a lot of empathy
According to Diana Baumrind, UC-BErkeley, the 4 styles of child upbringing are based on two dimensions. Her results have been confirmed in a massive 1994 study involving thousands of students as they entered adolescence in California and Washington states.
1) Responsiveness: its the degree to which parents respond to their children with support, warmth, affection, and acceptance. Warm parents usually communicate tiehr affection for their kids. Hostile parents mostly communicate their rejection of their kids.
2) Demandingness: the degree to which parents attempts to exert behavioral control. Restrictive parents tend to make and enforce rules mercilessly. permissive parents do not make any rules at all.
Theutho 4 parenting styles are:
-Authoritative: high demanding and high responsive, the best combination
-Authoritarian: high demanding and low responsive, too hard
-Indulgent: low demanding and high responsive, too soft
-Neglectful:low remanding and low responsiveness
Labeling and recognizing emotions is neurologically calming
Research has shown that parents who help their children in recognizing the emotions the child feels have a better chance in raising happy children. Kids who experience a parenthood that teaches them to recognize the child's feelings on regular basis become better at self-soothing and are more able to focus on tasks and have successful peer relationships. This is true because children experience the physiological results of emotional responses before they know and realize the verbal ways to phrase them to themselves. Without language-labels to describe the feelings children have, they can get confused as to what they experience.
10 years of music training
Researchers in Chicago have shown that children with experience in music learning, ones who have studied any musical instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7 were able to respond to subtle variations in emotional cues. Where as children without musical training did not show a distinctions in the emotions. This study suggests that for having happy kids later in life, get them started out on a musical journey =, early in life. Making sure that they stick with it for at least for 10 years.
Importance of acknowledging all emotions
People who deny their feelings often make bad choices. It is undertsood that no technique can make a feeling go away. It is suggested that parents verbalize the feelings of a child, this helps the children realize that the parents understand the child. Zecondly, validate the child's feelings if they are correct. Thirdly, indicate to the child that his/her feelings are understood by the parent. Essentially, it means that parents need to be emphatetic.
Key Points
-Infant needs parents to watch, listen, and repond to them
-How parents respond to their toddler's intense emotions is a big factor in determining how happy they might be as adults
-Children are happiest if their parents are demanding and warm
-Emotions need to be acknowledged and named but not judged.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Happiness
A major thing that determines personal happiness is the relationship one has with others. Other indicators or happiness are:
-altruistic acts
-being grateful generates happiness in short-term
-sharing experiences with others
-being forgiving to others
Money increases happiness only when it helps people out of poverty until $50,000 per year of income. After basic needs are satisfied, people generally need lots of close friends and relatives to be happy. It is beneficial to teach children about socializing, making friends, and sharing thoughts. For being socially connected the following two are important: emotional control and empathy.
People tend to like others who are nice, thoughtful, kind, outward, kind, focused, accommodating, forgiving, having deeper friendship and run away from folks who are moody, impulsive, rude, self-centered, rigid, and vindictive.
Children are born with temperament (to be taken with a healthy combination of doubtfulness)
It was Jerome Kagan who discovered that babies come to this world with inborn temperament. From a research's perspective temperament and personality are not the same. Many researchers believe that temperament provides an emotional and behavioral building blocks upon which personalities are constructed. If parents play a role of being loving, caring and understanding all children grow up just fine.
There are atleast three genes that have been identified that result in children doing fine in their lives even though they have a disappointing household. The presence of "slow MAOA" gene results in the lessening of the pain that can result from a trauma. The gene "DRD4-7" guards against insecurity. The gene "long 5-HTT helps people/children in resistance against stress.
-altruistic acts
-being grateful generates happiness in short-term
-sharing experiences with others
-being forgiving to others
Money increases happiness only when it helps people out of poverty until $50,000 per year of income. After basic needs are satisfied, people generally need lots of close friends and relatives to be happy. It is beneficial to teach children about socializing, making friends, and sharing thoughts. For being socially connected the following two are important: emotional control and empathy.
People tend to like others who are nice, thoughtful, kind, outward, kind, focused, accommodating, forgiving, having deeper friendship and run away from folks who are moody, impulsive, rude, self-centered, rigid, and vindictive.
Children are born with temperament (to be taken with a healthy combination of doubtfulness)
It was Jerome Kagan who discovered that babies come to this world with inborn temperament. From a research's perspective temperament and personality are not the same. Many researchers believe that temperament provides an emotional and behavioral building blocks upon which personalities are constructed. If parents play a role of being loving, caring and understanding all children grow up just fine.
There are atleast three genes that have been identified that result in children doing fine in their lives even though they have a disappointing household. The presence of "slow MAOA" gene results in the lessening of the pain that can result from a trauma. The gene "DRD4-7" guards against insecurity. The gene "long 5-HTT helps people/children in resistance against stress.
The support system-2
According to the author 50% of intellect is controlled by nature (genetics) and the remaining is determined by environmental factors. It has 2 consequences:
- The might be limits to what an individual's intellect can acheive.
- Aspect of intelligence is influenced by what parents do.
This chapter talks about biological basis of intelligence. Einstein's brain had nothing surprising besides few structural abnormalities. The regions responsible for visiospatial cognition and math processing were 15% larger than average size. It was missing some sections than less agile brains possess and was accompanied with a little more glial cells than average's. Nothing out of the ordinary, and currently it is impossible to demonstrate that few physical differences can lead to a genius.
However with current imaging technologies, is it possible to study the brain while a person is using it to solve problems? Yes, but the trouble is that the problem solving and sensory processing do not look the same in any two brains. Scientists have found 14 separate regions responsible for various aspects of intelligence, these areas are spread throughout the brain. These regions are studied as P-FIT (parietal-frontal integration theory). Imaging studies on children are difficult as they do not keep steady gait during the observational periods.
At the gene-level also it has been impossible to discover with certainty the genes responsible for being a "genius". The author states that he does not believe the existence of such a gene.
About IQ
IQ is susceptible to environmental factors. It can change if one is stressed, old, or living in a different culture from the testing majority. For a child, it is influenced by his/her familty. Growing up in the same household tends to increase IQ similarities between siblings. Poor people tend to have significantly lower IQs than rich people. And if one is below a certain income level, economic factors will have a much greater influence on a child's' IQ than if a child were in a middle-class family. Intelligence is not easy to measure and it is not necessary that people are born with a fixed intelligence from birth.
7 ingredients of intelligence
Human intelligence has two ingredients which are linked to human's evolutionary need.
First is the ability to record information: crystallized intelligence
Second is the capacity to adapt that information to new scenarios
More intelligence probably means the ability to do the above two things better than others.
The author listed five things to contemplate while thinking about a child's intellectual calibre. They are:
-Desire to explore
-Self control
-Creativity
-Verbal communication
-Decoding nonverbal communication
Children learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-correcting experiences. They experience sensory data, make predictions about new things they observe, then they design and implement new experiments that attempt to test their predictions. Later they evaluate their results and add the leaned knowledge to their self-generated database. Children are naturally born scientists with the whole world being their laboratory.
The result of 6 years study with data collected from more than 3000 innovative executives. The study tried to identify the traits that separate creative, innovative people. These qualities are termed as "Innovator's DNA" and the study won an award from Harvard Business Review.
Innovator's DNA
-Ability to associate creatively: people can see connections between apparently unrelated concepts, problems, or concepts.
-Habit of consistently asking "What if": people constantly asked "why not", "how come you are doing it this way" and kept poking at the limits of the current status-quo.
-Desire to tinker and experiment.
-being great at a specific kind of networking, with people whose educational backgrounds are different from self's.
-ability to closely observe details of others behaviours.
Want your baby to grow up and be asuccessful innovator?
Make sure he/she has nonverbal skills and inquisitiveness to go along with it.
A common feature among above three features is the interest to keep exploring and the biggest no-no was the non-exploration oriented system. The lead author Hal Gregersen of this study summarized a;; the skills of innovators are: Inquisitiveness.
The 4-year children are constantly asking wuestions, by the time they are 61/2 years old, they stop asking questions because they learn that their teachers value right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. After growing up as adults, in corporates, it is found that 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas.
Self-Control
The author mentioned that executive function is a better predictor of academic success thatn IQ. By executive functions, he refers to a child's ability to filter our distracting, tempting thoughts, which are critical in environments that are over-saturated with sensory stimuli and availability of on-demand choices.
Once the brain selects a relevant stimuli from the noise of distractions, the executive function allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unproductive distractions. A child's brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other modes of executive functions.
Creativity
It involves a bit of risk-taking of functional impulsivity and no the abnormal risk-taking. Creative entrepreneurs have functional impusivity instincts and high risk-taking measurements and a high ability to cope with ambiguity
Human learning is primarily a relational exercise. Intelligence is not developed with the aid of electronic media, but develops with human interactions and relationships.
Learning sign language may boost cognition by 50%
Gestures and speech use similar neural circuits in the brain and consequently, people who can no longer move their limbs after a brain injury also increasingly loose their ability to communicate verbally. Similarly, babies do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary until their fine-motor finger control improves. Gestures are windows into thought process.
Kids with normal hearing took American sign language class for nine months, in the first grade were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attention focus, spatial abilities, memory and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically by as much as 50% compared with controls who had no formal instruction.
Brain's day job is not learning
The brain is not interested in learning, it is hardwired to be interested in surviving. Learning occurs to serve the requirement of survival only. Humans do not survive for learning, but instead they learn so that they can survive.
For having a well educated child, create an environment of safety. When a brain's safety needs are catered to, it will allow its component neurons to expose themselves to other daily learning activities like education. A teacher should not be the source of danger (to students) in the class, instead the act of not learning should be the source of danger. Realizing that being ignorant of the class content can be dangerous to survival can perhaps help a brain to focus on the content, due to its survival instinct.
4 ingredients of the baby-parent interaction formula:
-mother's milk
-talking to baby
-guided play
-praising effort rather than the accomplishment
-Do not push a child to perform tasks that a child's brain is not yet developmentally ready to perform
stress to child to the point of a psychological "learned helplessness"
-No TV for under 2 years of child
-Marketed goods claiming additional benefits are optional to not necessary
-Strike a balance between intellectual balance and well-disciplined rigor
Mother's milk is a brain booster
Fact: Mother's milk fed babies in American score on an average of 8 points high than bottle-fed babies when given cognitive tests. It is observable even after a decade of having mother's milk. They get better grades in reading and writing.
American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers nurse their babies exclusively for first 6 months and continue to nurse as babies start eating solid foods and wean babies after the first year.
Talk to your baby-alot
It is one of the well established findings in the child's developmental studies. Taking to babies, even in the earliest age, with many words is encouraged. Equally, providing positive feedback is important. The reinforcement of language skills through interaction is beneficial. It can be done by looking at the child, imitating baby's speech, laughter, facial expressions. Providing additional attention on the responses of the child. Even though babies cannot respond to parents talk as adults, but they are always listening and it is good for babies.
Talking increases IQ
Fact: By age 3, children who were talked to regularly by their parents had IQ scores 1 + 1/2 times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least. Point to note is that the talking to the child needs to be done by the live interacting adults and not via electronic gadgets.
Open-ended activities are an important part of child's neural development. Studies show that, kids who played such games were:
More creative
Better at language
Better at problem solving
Less stressed
Better at memory
More socially skilled
Tools of the mind: Mature dramatic play
Researchers have found that children who act out imaginative scenes during a child-pay are more able to control their impulses. The three important parts of an imaginative play include planning the play, direct instruction on pretending, and the type of environment in which instructions place place.
What happens when the feedback to a child is "You are smart"
It is not recommended to praise a child for his/her fixed characteristic. If a child is praised on their fixed characteristics, one of the 3 may happen:
1) Child begins to think of any mistake committed by him/her as a failure as the child has got the feedback that his characteristic does not get results which might be a mistake. It is because he/she has been told that the success was due to some inherent ability of the child. As more mistakes happen in life, the child associates the mistakes as his/her characteristic of being a failure.
2) Child becomes used to being concerned of appearing to be smart than actually learning the things that gives successful results. Interest towards learning might reduce as the child is busy in appearing to be smart, in accordance to the feedback he/she obtained during childhood.
3) Child becomes less willing to confront the reasons, causes behind his/her deficiencies and less willing to amend those deficiencies. They have difficulty in admitting errors.
Instead try saying"You really worked hard"
The feed back given on the process, effort and the actions done by a child focuses the importance on the controllable effort rather than focusing the importance on the inherent qualities/characteristic of the child. Such a feed back is called Growth Mindset feedback. The previous kind of feedback is referred to as the fixed-mindset feedback. Over 30 years of research has shown that children raised in the growth mindset environment consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievements. Such growth mindset children have a refreshing attitude towards failure, they do not ruminate over their mistakes and think of their errors as problems that can be solved. They go back to solving their mistakes due to their growth mindset.Children praised for their effort successfully complete 50 to 60% more hard math problems than their peers praised for their intelligence. They believe that mistakes happen from the lack of effort and not from the absence of ability. The mistakes can be rectified by applying more cognitive attention and concentration.
The act of putting effort by children utilizes all their potential in getting something at hand done.
TVs, video games, and the internet
By nature, brain gives a high priority to visual processing. It does not mean that letting kids watch TVs, play video games, etc provide beneficial results. The digital age has increased the screen times of children and except for a few research of TV screen exposure, most of the other research findings are riddeled with messier research literature regarding brains, behaviors, and video games. A review of such work reveals shoddy designs, biased agenda, lack of controls, etc. that are needed for rigorous scientific study.
Why should parents be concerned about exposure to screens by children:
1) Kids are really good at imitations. Such characteristic of imitation after exposure to an event (only once) is called deferred imitation. This characteristic is well used by the advertising industry. Deferred imitation explains why most of us imitate our parents even after many years.
2) The content shown on the screens is very important as our expectations and assumptions pfrfoundly influence our perception of reality. Every individual's brain inadvertently inserts its opinions directly into what we are currently experiencing and then fools us into thinking what we experience as a hybrib mixture of what the brain things and what really happens.
Our perceptions are a mixture of what our senses report to our brain and what the brain thinks from its previous experience. What we expect to be going on is directly tied to what was allowed into our brain in the first place.
Experiences get mixed with the expectations and can influence an individual's behavior. What is allowed into a child's brain influences his/her expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what he/she is capable of perceiving but also a child's behavior. This is true for all humans irrespective of their age.
Affect of deferred imitations: No TV before age 2, a recommendation of the book's author.
TV can cause hostility and issues with focusing
Hostile peer interactions in children could be a result of deferred imitations and loss of impulse-control. For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9% that they might be involved in bullying behavior by the time they started school. American Association of Pediatrics estimates that 10 - 20% of real life violence can be attributed to exposure to media violence.
TV also interrupts with attention spans and the ability to focus which is an essential executive function of all humans. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under 3 years of age, the likelihood of attention problem by age 7 increased by about 10%. In other words, a preschooler who watches 3 hours of TV per day is 30% more likely to have attention-related problems than a child who watches no TV.
Interestingly, second hand exposure, the event of having the TV on while no one is watching also seemed to do damage too, possibly due to the distractions caused by it. In laboratories tests, flashing images and booming sound tracks continually distracted children from their activities and American Association of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation that stands valid today.
" Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers for healthy brain growth and development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills."
TV aimed at babies are not so brainy (Definitely read this part)
A group of researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle. They had tested a Disney product Baby Einstein DVDs and had attracted a phone call from Robert Iger, the then head of the Disney Company. So what happened...the researchers studied the claims of the educational DVDs and studied infants of 17 to 24 months age. They found that for every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of 6 - 8 fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Disney demanded a retraction of this findings by citing deficiencies of the research study. The university held its ground and two years later in October 2009, the company offered refunds to anyone who had purchased Baby Einstein materials and eventually dropped the word "educational" from the packaging.
After age 5
Some TC shows indicate an improvement in brain performance, the shows happen to be interactive in content. Other recommendations for TV viewing data suggests:
- Keep the TV off before the child turns 2
-After age 2, help the child to choose the shows by paying attention to a show that allows intelligent interaction
-Watch the chosen TV show with the children while interacting with the media, helping them to analyze and think critically about what they see on TV.
-Evaluate putting TV in a kids room. Children with their own TVs score an average of 8 points lower on math and language-arts tests than those with TVs in the common room.
Video Games: Have some physical activity
Due to recentness of video games affect of brain development, the data concentrates on the physical affects of video games. Childhood obesity is 3 times more prevalent in gamers than in non-gamers.
Exercise, especially aerobic exercise is great for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50-100% points. This is true irrespective of the age. Parents who introduce their kids to exercise schedule are more lively to help in making it a child's life-long habit. Its the consequence of deferred imitation that was mentioned earlier. Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts that can be given to a child.
What about texting
From an anecdotal approach the author presents a case of a children's slumber party, that does not involve healthy face to face interactions between friends and instead the use of cell phones results in children texting other friends and spending time with the cell phones rather than interacting with the members present in their room. It appears that texting might result in the loss of direct communication via face-to-face interactions and this might lead to children not being able to decipher nonverbal cues that humans often use in daily lives. The best current advice of author: keep cell phones, texting away as long as possible.
Do not compare two baby's milestones
As no two children are same, so are their developments. A comparison between children puts undesired pressure on a child that can be harmful to his/her development. Beside, it puts parents also under tremendous pressure. There are no prescribed growth steps that all children go through development stages at their own pace, they sometimes skip a step or two or repeat the same stage several times in a row. Some go through no definable stages at all. There is nothing wrong with children's developmental stages, the problem is with the researcher's current ( and limited) theories.
No Hyper-parenting
These are parents who seem to see their kids as a merit badges rather than as individuals. These parents try to pursue their child's intellectual success at the cost of the child's happiness. The author mentions that data on parental effects on children is not much available. David Elkind, a former faculty at Tufts University has following classifications of parents:
Gourmet parents:
These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did.
College-degree parents:
They are related to above gourmet parents but believe that it is better to have a sooner academic training.
Outward-bound parents:
They are interested in exposing their children to physical survival skills so that their children can survive in a dangerous world. Typically, these parents have an military, law enforcement backdround.
Prodigy parents:
Typically are financially successful and suspicious about educational system. They prefer having al alternative to educational system and are interested in preventing their children against the negative effects of schooling.
A cautionary information is provided by the author that South Korea's high school students have parental pressure to perform well on standardized tests and it is observed that after traffic accidents, suicide is a leading cause of deaths among 15-19 years olds.
Effects of Hyper-parenting on intellectual development
1) High expectations can stunt higher-level thinking among children as they look for options to please their parent's expectations.
2) Parental pressure can curb a child's curiosity. If their exploratory nature is not rewarded, it gets discarded as child is in the survival mode to please its parents.
3) Continuous disappointment from parents can lead to stress among children. It can create a psychological sate of helplessness among children and can physically alter a child's brain development. Let this be the guiding sentence: Parenting is not a race. Wonderful ways to maximize a child's development is to engage in open-ended play, verbal communications, praising the efforts, among others.
- The might be limits to what an individual's intellect can acheive.
- Aspect of intelligence is influenced by what parents do.
This chapter talks about biological basis of intelligence. Einstein's brain had nothing surprising besides few structural abnormalities. The regions responsible for visiospatial cognition and math processing were 15% larger than average size. It was missing some sections than less agile brains possess and was accompanied with a little more glial cells than average's. Nothing out of the ordinary, and currently it is impossible to demonstrate that few physical differences can lead to a genius.
However with current imaging technologies, is it possible to study the brain while a person is using it to solve problems? Yes, but the trouble is that the problem solving and sensory processing do not look the same in any two brains. Scientists have found 14 separate regions responsible for various aspects of intelligence, these areas are spread throughout the brain. These regions are studied as P-FIT (parietal-frontal integration theory). Imaging studies on children are difficult as they do not keep steady gait during the observational periods.
At the gene-level also it has been impossible to discover with certainty the genes responsible for being a "genius". The author states that he does not believe the existence of such a gene.
About IQ
IQ is susceptible to environmental factors. It can change if one is stressed, old, or living in a different culture from the testing majority. For a child, it is influenced by his/her familty. Growing up in the same household tends to increase IQ similarities between siblings. Poor people tend to have significantly lower IQs than rich people. And if one is below a certain income level, economic factors will have a much greater influence on a child's' IQ than if a child were in a middle-class family. Intelligence is not easy to measure and it is not necessary that people are born with a fixed intelligence from birth.
7 ingredients of intelligence
Human intelligence has two ingredients which are linked to human's evolutionary need.
First is the ability to record information: crystallized intelligence
Second is the capacity to adapt that information to new scenarios
More intelligence probably means the ability to do the above two things better than others.
The author listed five things to contemplate while thinking about a child's intellectual calibre. They are:
-Desire to explore
-Self control
-Creativity
-Verbal communication
-Decoding nonverbal communication
Children learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-correcting experiences. They experience sensory data, make predictions about new things they observe, then they design and implement new experiments that attempt to test their predictions. Later they evaluate their results and add the leaned knowledge to their self-generated database. Children are naturally born scientists with the whole world being their laboratory.
The result of 6 years study with data collected from more than 3000 innovative executives. The study tried to identify the traits that separate creative, innovative people. These qualities are termed as "Innovator's DNA" and the study won an award from Harvard Business Review.
Innovator's DNA
-Ability to associate creatively: people can see connections between apparently unrelated concepts, problems, or concepts.
-Habit of consistently asking "What if": people constantly asked "why not", "how come you are doing it this way" and kept poking at the limits of the current status-quo.
-Desire to tinker and experiment.
-being great at a specific kind of networking, with people whose educational backgrounds are different from self's.
-ability to closely observe details of others behaviours.
Want your baby to grow up and be asuccessful innovator?
Make sure he/she has nonverbal skills and inquisitiveness to go along with it.
A common feature among above three features is the interest to keep exploring and the biggest no-no was the non-exploration oriented system. The lead author Hal Gregersen of this study summarized a;; the skills of innovators are: Inquisitiveness.
The 4-year children are constantly asking wuestions, by the time they are 61/2 years old, they stop asking questions because they learn that their teachers value right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. After growing up as adults, in corporates, it is found that 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas.
Self-Control
The author mentioned that executive function is a better predictor of academic success thatn IQ. By executive functions, he refers to a child's ability to filter our distracting, tempting thoughts, which are critical in environments that are over-saturated with sensory stimuli and availability of on-demand choices.
Once the brain selects a relevant stimuli from the noise of distractions, the executive function allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unproductive distractions. A child's brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other modes of executive functions.
Creativity
It involves a bit of risk-taking of functional impulsivity and no the abnormal risk-taking. Creative entrepreneurs have functional impusivity instincts and high risk-taking measurements and a high ability to cope with ambiguity
Human learning is primarily a relational exercise. Intelligence is not developed with the aid of electronic media, but develops with human interactions and relationships.
Learning sign language may boost cognition by 50%
Gestures and speech use similar neural circuits in the brain and consequently, people who can no longer move their limbs after a brain injury also increasingly loose their ability to communicate verbally. Similarly, babies do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary until their fine-motor finger control improves. Gestures are windows into thought process.
Kids with normal hearing took American sign language class for nine months, in the first grade were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attention focus, spatial abilities, memory and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically by as much as 50% compared with controls who had no formal instruction.
Brain's day job is not learning
The brain is not interested in learning, it is hardwired to be interested in surviving. Learning occurs to serve the requirement of survival only. Humans do not survive for learning, but instead they learn so that they can survive.
For having a well educated child, create an environment of safety. When a brain's safety needs are catered to, it will allow its component neurons to expose themselves to other daily learning activities like education. A teacher should not be the source of danger (to students) in the class, instead the act of not learning should be the source of danger. Realizing that being ignorant of the class content can be dangerous to survival can perhaps help a brain to focus on the content, due to its survival instinct.
4 ingredients of the baby-parent interaction formula:
-mother's milk
-talking to baby
-guided play
-praising effort rather than the accomplishment
-Do not push a child to perform tasks that a child's brain is not yet developmentally ready to perform
stress to child to the point of a psychological "learned helplessness"
-No TV for under 2 years of child
-Marketed goods claiming additional benefits are optional to not necessary
-Strike a balance between intellectual balance and well-disciplined rigor
Mother's milk is a brain booster
Fact: Mother's milk fed babies in American score on an average of 8 points high than bottle-fed babies when given cognitive tests. It is observable even after a decade of having mother's milk. They get better grades in reading and writing.
American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers nurse their babies exclusively for first 6 months and continue to nurse as babies start eating solid foods and wean babies after the first year.
Talk to your baby-alot
It is one of the well established findings in the child's developmental studies. Taking to babies, even in the earliest age, with many words is encouraged. Equally, providing positive feedback is important. The reinforcement of language skills through interaction is beneficial. It can be done by looking at the child, imitating baby's speech, laughter, facial expressions. Providing additional attention on the responses of the child. Even though babies cannot respond to parents talk as adults, but they are always listening and it is good for babies.
Talking increases IQ
Fact: By age 3, children who were talked to regularly by their parents had IQ scores 1 + 1/2 times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least. Point to note is that the talking to the child needs to be done by the live interacting adults and not via electronic gadgets.
Open-ended activities are an important part of child's neural development. Studies show that, kids who played such games were:
More creative
Better at language
Better at problem solving
Less stressed
Better at memory
More socially skilled
Tools of the mind: Mature dramatic play
Researchers have found that children who act out imaginative scenes during a child-pay are more able to control their impulses. The three important parts of an imaginative play include planning the play, direct instruction on pretending, and the type of environment in which instructions place place.
What happens when the feedback to a child is "You are smart"
It is not recommended to praise a child for his/her fixed characteristic. If a child is praised on their fixed characteristics, one of the 3 may happen:
1) Child begins to think of any mistake committed by him/her as a failure as the child has got the feedback that his characteristic does not get results which might be a mistake. It is because he/she has been told that the success was due to some inherent ability of the child. As more mistakes happen in life, the child associates the mistakes as his/her characteristic of being a failure.
2) Child becomes used to being concerned of appearing to be smart than actually learning the things that gives successful results. Interest towards learning might reduce as the child is busy in appearing to be smart, in accordance to the feedback he/she obtained during childhood.
3) Child becomes less willing to confront the reasons, causes behind his/her deficiencies and less willing to amend those deficiencies. They have difficulty in admitting errors.
Instead try saying"You really worked hard"
The feed back given on the process, effort and the actions done by a child focuses the importance on the controllable effort rather than focusing the importance on the inherent qualities/characteristic of the child. Such a feed back is called Growth Mindset feedback. The previous kind of feedback is referred to as the fixed-mindset feedback. Over 30 years of research has shown that children raised in the growth mindset environment consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievements. Such growth mindset children have a refreshing attitude towards failure, they do not ruminate over their mistakes and think of their errors as problems that can be solved. They go back to solving their mistakes due to their growth mindset.Children praised for their effort successfully complete 50 to 60% more hard math problems than their peers praised for their intelligence. They believe that mistakes happen from the lack of effort and not from the absence of ability. The mistakes can be rectified by applying more cognitive attention and concentration.
The act of putting effort by children utilizes all their potential in getting something at hand done.
TVs, video games, and the internet
By nature, brain gives a high priority to visual processing. It does not mean that letting kids watch TVs, play video games, etc provide beneficial results. The digital age has increased the screen times of children and except for a few research of TV screen exposure, most of the other research findings are riddeled with messier research literature regarding brains, behaviors, and video games. A review of such work reveals shoddy designs, biased agenda, lack of controls, etc. that are needed for rigorous scientific study.
Why should parents be concerned about exposure to screens by children:
1) Kids are really good at imitations. Such characteristic of imitation after exposure to an event (only once) is called deferred imitation. This characteristic is well used by the advertising industry. Deferred imitation explains why most of us imitate our parents even after many years.
2) The content shown on the screens is very important as our expectations and assumptions pfrfoundly influence our perception of reality. Every individual's brain inadvertently inserts its opinions directly into what we are currently experiencing and then fools us into thinking what we experience as a hybrib mixture of what the brain things and what really happens.
Our perceptions are a mixture of what our senses report to our brain and what the brain thinks from its previous experience. What we expect to be going on is directly tied to what was allowed into our brain in the first place.
Experiences get mixed with the expectations and can influence an individual's behavior. What is allowed into a child's brain influences his/her expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what he/she is capable of perceiving but also a child's behavior. This is true for all humans irrespective of their age.
Affect of deferred imitations: No TV before age 2, a recommendation of the book's author.
TV can cause hostility and issues with focusing
Hostile peer interactions in children could be a result of deferred imitations and loss of impulse-control. For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9% that they might be involved in bullying behavior by the time they started school. American Association of Pediatrics estimates that 10 - 20% of real life violence can be attributed to exposure to media violence.
TV also interrupts with attention spans and the ability to focus which is an essential executive function of all humans. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under 3 years of age, the likelihood of attention problem by age 7 increased by about 10%. In other words, a preschooler who watches 3 hours of TV per day is 30% more likely to have attention-related problems than a child who watches no TV.
Interestingly, second hand exposure, the event of having the TV on while no one is watching also seemed to do damage too, possibly due to the distractions caused by it. In laboratories tests, flashing images and booming sound tracks continually distracted children from their activities and American Association of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation that stands valid today.
" Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers for healthy brain growth and development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills."
TV aimed at babies are not so brainy (Definitely read this part)
A group of researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle. They had tested a Disney product Baby Einstein DVDs and had attracted a phone call from Robert Iger, the then head of the Disney Company. So what happened...the researchers studied the claims of the educational DVDs and studied infants of 17 to 24 months age. They found that for every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of 6 - 8 fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Disney demanded a retraction of this findings by citing deficiencies of the research study. The university held its ground and two years later in October 2009, the company offered refunds to anyone who had purchased Baby Einstein materials and eventually dropped the word "educational" from the packaging.
After age 5
Some TC shows indicate an improvement in brain performance, the shows happen to be interactive in content. Other recommendations for TV viewing data suggests:
- Keep the TV off before the child turns 2
-After age 2, help the child to choose the shows by paying attention to a show that allows intelligent interaction
-Watch the chosen TV show with the children while interacting with the media, helping them to analyze and think critically about what they see on TV.
-Evaluate putting TV in a kids room. Children with their own TVs score an average of 8 points lower on math and language-arts tests than those with TVs in the common room.
Video Games: Have some physical activity
Due to recentness of video games affect of brain development, the data concentrates on the physical affects of video games. Childhood obesity is 3 times more prevalent in gamers than in non-gamers.
Exercise, especially aerobic exercise is great for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50-100% points. This is true irrespective of the age. Parents who introduce their kids to exercise schedule are more lively to help in making it a child's life-long habit. Its the consequence of deferred imitation that was mentioned earlier. Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts that can be given to a child.
What about texting
From an anecdotal approach the author presents a case of a children's slumber party, that does not involve healthy face to face interactions between friends and instead the use of cell phones results in children texting other friends and spending time with the cell phones rather than interacting with the members present in their room. It appears that texting might result in the loss of direct communication via face-to-face interactions and this might lead to children not being able to decipher nonverbal cues that humans often use in daily lives. The best current advice of author: keep cell phones, texting away as long as possible.
Do not compare two baby's milestones
As no two children are same, so are their developments. A comparison between children puts undesired pressure on a child that can be harmful to his/her development. Beside, it puts parents also under tremendous pressure. There are no prescribed growth steps that all children go through development stages at their own pace, they sometimes skip a step or two or repeat the same stage several times in a row. Some go through no definable stages at all. There is nothing wrong with children's developmental stages, the problem is with the researcher's current ( and limited) theories.
No Hyper-parenting
These are parents who seem to see their kids as a merit badges rather than as individuals. These parents try to pursue their child's intellectual success at the cost of the child's happiness. The author mentions that data on parental effects on children is not much available. David Elkind, a former faculty at Tufts University has following classifications of parents:
Gourmet parents:
These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did.
College-degree parents:
They are related to above gourmet parents but believe that it is better to have a sooner academic training.
Outward-bound parents:
They are interested in exposing their children to physical survival skills so that their children can survive in a dangerous world. Typically, these parents have an military, law enforcement backdround.
Prodigy parents:
Typically are financially successful and suspicious about educational system. They prefer having al alternative to educational system and are interested in preventing their children against the negative effects of schooling.
A cautionary information is provided by the author that South Korea's high school students have parental pressure to perform well on standardized tests and it is observed that after traffic accidents, suicide is a leading cause of deaths among 15-19 years olds.
Effects of Hyper-parenting on intellectual development
1) High expectations can stunt higher-level thinking among children as they look for options to please their parent's expectations.
2) Parental pressure can curb a child's curiosity. If their exploratory nature is not rewarded, it gets discarded as child is in the survival mode to please its parents.
3) Continuous disappointment from parents can lead to stress among children. It can create a psychological sate of helplessness among children and can physically alter a child's brain development. Let this be the guiding sentence: Parenting is not a race. Wonderful ways to maximize a child's development is to engage in open-ended play, verbal communications, praising the efforts, among others.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
The support system
An infant's dependence of the caregiver tends it self to make him/her susceptible to a rewiring of his/her nervous system depending on the external interaction perceived by the baby. This chapter dealt with how the family-based interactions affect a child's development.
4 most important sources of family-based dissatisfaction, after having the first baby:
sleep loss
social isolation
unbalanced workload
depression
Babies seek safety above all
It was Harry Harlow who discovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. By performing studies on babies of rhesus monkeys, Harlow discovered that it was not the presence of food that mean reassurance to the little babies, it was the presence or absence of a safe harbor that determined how the baby monkeys reacted.
Human babies are attuned to the feelings of safety and not to the availability of food, or help with other activities.
An interesting observation by a psychologist Andy Meltzoff: A baby who is 42 minutes old was able to imitate Andy's act of sticking out tongue. Imitation by a 42 minutes baby is really amazing as it involves many high level understandings by babies, from discovering that other humans exist in the outside world, that babies have functional body parts as other humans they see. Pretty awesome!
Human babies can create hypotheses, test them, and then appraise their findings with enthusiasm of an adult. They are happy and quick learners. Children are constantly observing their parents and are influenced by what they observe.
Bonding with parents provides safety
During the baby's attachment (to parents) period, a baby's brain intensely monitors the care giving it receives. It is constantly asking questions like" am I being held, am I being fed?, who is safe?
If the baby's requirements are being fulfilled, the brain develops one way; if they are not being fulfilled, it develops another way. There is a time window of several years during which babies strive to create the bonds with their parents and establish a feeling of safety. If it does not happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In some extreme cases, they might be scared for life. The above statements were understood from the study of children from Communist Romania, during 1990s.
In 1966 Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu policies resulted in an increase in the number of babies being born and often abandoned due to limited resources of parents. Such abandoned children were taken into state orphanages (in thousands of numbers). With limited resources, the orphanages were not good for children. In these orphanages, children were never held or given any sensory stimulation. Many were tied to their beds, left alone for hours, they stared into space and were silent for long hours. Some of these children, in later years were adopted by Canadian families. As these children grew up, researchers could differentiate these children based on their interactions. One group seemed remarkably sable and indistinguishable from healthy Canadian control group. The other group seemed troubled. The troubled group had eating problems, got sick more often, had aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable was the age of adoption of children.
If the children were adopted before the 4th month of life, they acted like every other happy kid. If they were adopted after the 8th month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly resulted in immense stress to their growth. This stress affected the children's behavior during later years also. They were out of the orphanages for long time but were actually never able to erase their childhood experiences.
Babies response to stress
If a baby regularly experiences an angry, emotionally violent social environment, his/her developing stress responders turn hyper-active to cause a condition called "Hypercortosolism". On the other hand, if a baby is exposed to severe neglect, like the Romanian orphans, it causes "Hypocortosolism".
What happens when parents throw emotional punches
Even if the above happens on regular basis, it is capable of hurting a baby's development. Such affects are reversible, if infants are taken from severely traumatized environments and placed in nurturing environments, if younger than 8 months, can show improvement in their stress-hormone regulation.
Changes baby's behavior
babies in emltionally iunstable environments are less able to respond to a new stimuli, calm themselves and recover from stress. They find it difficult to regulate their own emotions. The stress hormones can interact with hone mineralization and affect the leg development. Such environmentally-raised children statistically are more likely to display antisocial behavior, aggression in school, cannot focus their attention very well, have less idea of pacifying themselves.
Effect of parental divorse is present in several years later after the divorce. Children from divorced households are 25% more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14, become pregnant out of wedlock, twice as likely to get divorced themselves, get lower grades than children in stable households, less likely to receive college education support.
In non-divorced households, research has shown that the time spent in household disturbance (happening in front of child) is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation kids observe. Many couples avoid reconciliation in front of their children and it skews child's perception as they are unable to appreciate the act of reconciliation. The act of reconciliation before children gives them an opportunity to learn about how to make-up after a disagreement.
Being Empathetic is essential
Empathy not only matters, it is the foundation of effective parenting - Gottman
Choosing to empathize with each other is another act that can assist in the development of children. Empathy as defined by research literature has following components:
- Detecting a change in the emotional state of someone else.
- After detecting the emotional state of another person, an individual transports what he observes (in other person) onto his/her own thinking. A person "wears the shoes" of the other person and observes how he would react to similar circumstances.
-Being aware of the boundary that the person who is observing and empathizing is not in reality experiencing what he/she observes.
Learning to empathize
-Observe and describe the emotional changes of others
-Try to figure out the reasons that caused the observed emotional changes in others
4 most important sources of family-based dissatisfaction, after having the first baby:
sleep loss
social isolation
unbalanced workload
depression
Babies seek safety above all
It was Harry Harlow who discovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. By performing studies on babies of rhesus monkeys, Harlow discovered that it was not the presence of food that mean reassurance to the little babies, it was the presence or absence of a safe harbor that determined how the baby monkeys reacted.
Human babies are attuned to the feelings of safety and not to the availability of food, or help with other activities.
An interesting observation by a psychologist Andy Meltzoff: A baby who is 42 minutes old was able to imitate Andy's act of sticking out tongue. Imitation by a 42 minutes baby is really amazing as it involves many high level understandings by babies, from discovering that other humans exist in the outside world, that babies have functional body parts as other humans they see. Pretty awesome!
Human babies can create hypotheses, test them, and then appraise their findings with enthusiasm of an adult. They are happy and quick learners. Children are constantly observing their parents and are influenced by what they observe.
Bonding with parents provides safety
During the baby's attachment (to parents) period, a baby's brain intensely monitors the care giving it receives. It is constantly asking questions like" am I being held, am I being fed?, who is safe?
If the baby's requirements are being fulfilled, the brain develops one way; if they are not being fulfilled, it develops another way. There is a time window of several years during which babies strive to create the bonds with their parents and establish a feeling of safety. If it does not happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In some extreme cases, they might be scared for life. The above statements were understood from the study of children from Communist Romania, during 1990s.
In 1966 Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu policies resulted in an increase in the number of babies being born and often abandoned due to limited resources of parents. Such abandoned children were taken into state orphanages (in thousands of numbers). With limited resources, the orphanages were not good for children. In these orphanages, children were never held or given any sensory stimulation. Many were tied to their beds, left alone for hours, they stared into space and were silent for long hours. Some of these children, in later years were adopted by Canadian families. As these children grew up, researchers could differentiate these children based on their interactions. One group seemed remarkably sable and indistinguishable from healthy Canadian control group. The other group seemed troubled. The troubled group had eating problems, got sick more often, had aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable was the age of adoption of children.
If the children were adopted before the 4th month of life, they acted like every other happy kid. If they were adopted after the 8th month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly resulted in immense stress to their growth. This stress affected the children's behavior during later years also. They were out of the orphanages for long time but were actually never able to erase their childhood experiences.
Babies response to stress
If a baby regularly experiences an angry, emotionally violent social environment, his/her developing stress responders turn hyper-active to cause a condition called "Hypercortosolism". On the other hand, if a baby is exposed to severe neglect, like the Romanian orphans, it causes "Hypocortosolism".
What happens when parents throw emotional punches
Even if the above happens on regular basis, it is capable of hurting a baby's development. Such affects are reversible, if infants are taken from severely traumatized environments and placed in nurturing environments, if younger than 8 months, can show improvement in their stress-hormone regulation.
Changes baby's behavior
babies in emltionally iunstable environments are less able to respond to a new stimuli, calm themselves and recover from stress. They find it difficult to regulate their own emotions. The stress hormones can interact with hone mineralization and affect the leg development. Such environmentally-raised children statistically are more likely to display antisocial behavior, aggression in school, cannot focus their attention very well, have less idea of pacifying themselves.
Effect of parental divorse is present in several years later after the divorce. Children from divorced households are 25% more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14, become pregnant out of wedlock, twice as likely to get divorced themselves, get lower grades than children in stable households, less likely to receive college education support.
In non-divorced households, research has shown that the time spent in household disturbance (happening in front of child) is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation kids observe. Many couples avoid reconciliation in front of their children and it skews child's perception as they are unable to appreciate the act of reconciliation. The act of reconciliation before children gives them an opportunity to learn about how to make-up after a disagreement.
Being Empathetic is essential
Empathy not only matters, it is the foundation of effective parenting - Gottman
Choosing to empathize with each other is another act that can assist in the development of children. Empathy as defined by research literature has following components:
- Detecting a change in the emotional state of someone else.
- After detecting the emotional state of another person, an individual transports what he observes (in other person) onto his/her own thinking. A person "wears the shoes" of the other person and observes how he would react to similar circumstances.
-Being aware of the boundary that the person who is observing and empathizing is not in reality experiencing what he/she observes.
Learning to empathize
-Observe and describe the emotional changes of others
-Try to figure out the reasons that caused the observed emotional changes in others
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Chapter-1, The Beginning
Baby develops an active mental life in the womb. Stressed mother, stressed baby. Eat right, stay active, be happy.
An important message that the authors gives about in-utero development during the first half of pregnancy is that "the baby wants to be left alone" in a quite external environment. From baby's point of view, the womb is the best place to be as it is free of external stimulation. In one of the study that has not been replicated, it was observed that children whose mothers suffered from major nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, as the children reached school age, 21% of them scored 130 or more points on a standard IQ test. If the mother did not have any morning sickness, only 7% of kids did that well. This is only a THEORY and not proven. I do not anticipate any meaningful scientific relationship in this finding.
The author mentions that no commercial product has ever been shown in a scientific responsible manner to do anything to improve the brain performance of a developing fetus. There have been no double-blind, randomized experiments whose independent variable was the presence or absence of the gadget. A corporate approach to market such products is appalling to the research community.
It is very strongly recommended to expectant mothers to take B-complex vitamin folic acid, as it helps in shaping the proper neural tube of the fetus.It is the first thing that needs to be done to aid fetus's brain development. At this point of time, researchers cannot explain about 66.7% of observed birth-defects. Only a 25% of all known birth defects have been tied to an isolable DNA problem. Mother's body appears to have a fail-safe mechanism, if something goes wrong during the fetus's development, her body often senses the trouble and deliberately induces a miscarriage. About 20% of pregnancies end in spontaneous terminations. The known environmental toxins and things that can be monitored, account for only a 10% of birth defects observed in the lab.
Surprisingly, a baby's brain development does not finish complete wiring until he/she is in his/her 20s. Boy's brains may take even longer. In humans, the brain is the last organ to finish developing.
When can your baby hear you, smell you?
The developmental principle to remember is:
The brain spends the first half of pregnancy setting up its neuro-anatomical cell production, while ignoring most well-intended parental involvement (of things like drugs, alcohol, nicotine, etc).
The second half of pregnancy is a different story. Here the brain development moves from mostly neurogenesis to mostly synaptogenesis, the fetus begins to exhibit much greater sensitivity to the outer world. During the second half of pregnancy, the wiring of cells is much more subject to outside influences, including the parents.
Babies remember from inside the womb:
From 4th week: Touch, sight, hearing
From 5th week: smell
From 6th week:balance
From 8th week: taste
4 this proven to help baby's brain development
These are especially important in the second half of pregnancy.
-weight
-nutrition
-stress
-exercise
Weight:
Baby's IQ is typically a function of his/her brain volume. The brain size predicts about 20% of the variance in baby's IQ scores. Brain volume is related to birth weight. larger babies are typically (may be expected) to be of higher IQ scores. IQ rises with birth weight, upto 8 pounds.
If the BMI of mother is between 25 and 29.9, then the mothers may gain only about 15 to 25 pounds to have a healthy baby. It might be better to add about half a pound a week in the critical second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
For normal weighing mothers and if BMI of mother is less than 18.5, mothers need to gain between 28 to 40 pounds to optimize baby's development. That is equivalent to a pound a week in the critical last half of pregnancy.
From nutritional studies, it is known that between 4 months to birth, the fetus becomes sensitive to both the amount and the type of food mother consumes.
Eating the right food
When an expectant mother has desires to eat particular foods, it is not the baby telegraphing its nutritional needs. There is some evidence that iron deficiencies can be consciously detected, but the data is not as extensive as desired as need to make this observation a fact.
Expectant mothers feel stressed a lot during pregnancy and the food cravings reflect a learned alleviating response to such stress.
Eating a balanced meal with heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables is probably the best advice for pregnant women. A source of iron in the form of red meat is appropriate. Iron is necessary for proper brain development and normal functioning even in adults.
According to the author, Ginkgo Biloba is not a neurotonic, it does not improve cognition of any kind in healthy adults-not memory, not visual-spatial cognition, not language, or others. It does not prevent or slow down Alzheimer's or dementia. Best thing at this point of time is probably to get a good night sleep.
Neurons need Omega-3
The two known supplements having data to support an influence on brain development is utero are:
Folic acid taken around conception. The other is Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3s are critical components of the membranes that makeup a neuron, without it newrons do not function very well. Humans have hard time manufacturing Omega-3s and have to look for outside source. Eating fish, is a good source. Studies show that if a person does not take enough Omega-3s, they are at a much greater risk for dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, even schizophrenia.
Does an increased consumption of omega-3s help in increasing the brain power, especially for the baby? Here the evidence gets decidedly mixed.
One Harvard study looked at 135 infants and eating habits of their mother during pregnancy. The researchers found that mothers who ate more fish starting in the second trimester had smarter babies that those who did not. By smarter, the author meant, babies who performed better on cognitive tests that measure memory, recognition, and attention at six months post-birth. The effects were not large, but they existed. Consequently, researchers recommend that pregnant women eat at least 12 ounces of fish per week.
What about the mercury content in fish? it appears that the benefits outweigh the harm. The sources of omega-3s are recommended to be from less concentrated fish sources of salmon, cod, haddock, sardines, and canned light tuna.
Avoid too much stress
It is known with certainty that stress of expectant mothers is not good for babies. This finding results from the study of researchers who studied the babies born during the time of a natural disaster of an ice storm in Quebec in January 4th 1998.
Documented results from the book, if a mother is stressed during pregnancy.
-It can change the temparament of the child, infant may become more irritable, less consolable.
-May lower baby's IQ by an average of 8 points in certain mental and motor inventories measured in a baby's first year of life. Using David Wechsler's 19944 schema, this spread can be the difference between "average IQ" and "bright normal"
-Can inhibit baby;s future motor skills, attention states, and ability to concentrate, differences still observable at age 6. It may damage baby's stress-response system.
-Stress can even shrink the size of a baby's brain.
A review of more than 100 studies in various developed countries confirm these powerful negative effects on prenatal brain development. David Laplante, a lead author pf the ice-storm study has said that they suspect an exposure to high levels of stress may have altered fetal neurodevelopment and influenced the expression of the children's neurobehavioral abilities in early childhood.
3 types of toxic stress
Too frequent:
such as overly demanding jod, chronic illness, lack of social support, and poverty.
Too severe:
such as marital separation, divorce, death of a loved ones, loss of a job, criminal assault, and other events that lead to a loss of control by expectant mothers.
Too much for you
If you have a tendency to be stressed all the time, so will be the womb.
A woman's stress hormones affect her baby by slipping through the placenta and entering the baby's brain. The first target is the baby's limbic system, an area profoundly involved in emotional regulation and memory. This region develops more slowly in the presence of excess hormone. The second target is the braking system, the region that is supposed to control the stress hormones (glucocorticoid) levels after the stress has passed. Excess hormone from mom can mean baby has a difficult time turning off her own stress hormone system. Baby's brain becomes marinated in glucocortoids whose contentrations are no longer easily controllable. The baby can carry this damaged stress-response system to adulthood. The baby may have trouble in braking and controlling her/himself during the stressful phase. If the baby is a female, she eventually affects her baby amd th enext-generation brain shrinks further, it is a vicious cycle. Excessive stress is contagious and parents can get it from children or vice versa.
For optimal development of a baby's brain, mothers should be in a low-stress environment, especially in the last few months of pregnancy. To be mothers can identify the areas of life where they fell out of control and form strategies to take back control. The website resourcing the book:www.brainrules.net has a number od techniques known from research literature to reduce stress. An important one is exercise, in fact exercise is recommended to be a part of living.
A benefit of exercise is a reduction in the time the baby takes to come out of the birth canal. The quicker the baby comes out, the less chances are for the baby's brain damage from oxygen deprivation.
Exercise (especially aerobic) protect an expecting mother against the negative influence of stress by blocking the nasty stress hormones called glucocorticoids. However, doing too strenuous exercises is not recommended as baby can feel and react to mother's motion. During later stages of pregnancy, strenuous exercises that increase mothers hear rate above 70% of maximal rate (=154 bears/min) are to be avoided as they may shut off blood flow to the womb. Elevations of more than 2 degrees Celsius raise the miscarriage and can effect brain and eye development.American college of obstetricians recommend 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise per day.
Key Points:
- In the first half of pregnancy, babies want to be left alone
-Don't waste money on products claiming to improve a preborn baby's development.
-In second half of pregnancy, babies begin to feel, see, and sense.
-Four ways to boost baby development: gaining proper weight, eating a balanced food, exercising moderately, and reducing stress.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)